Legacy LD5

LD5 merch would be entertaining. :3 I know I'd proudly attain some.

Buttonz!

Clawz!


Mirage

If it makes you feel any better, I've pretty much never posted anything anywhere else. Not that it amounts to much.

I'm always here, I'm just quiet. I had a roommate situation for the past year that did not allow me any privacy so the clawz time was cut down significantly. Looking is bad enough for my paranoia, but when I work on anything I get pretty focused and a person could probably walk right up without me noticing. Then they see the dragon and what the dragon is doing and then someone's got 'splainin to do. I need lockable doors to work with any sort of peace of mind. I have a couple things that I just never got the alone time to finish up.

Oh and some random movie clips of interest, but that's just me being lazy.

I enjoy the atmosphere here or I wouldn't have hung around for...7 years? God I lurk too much.

*chuckles* - interesting thread.

Well said, Dino - the fandom has become far too much of a popularity contest. I go to places like Macrophile.com and see an irritating hierarchy of those held up on celebrity-like pedestals and those below who get walked all over just for talking ( ...woo, that's an arousing thought... Lol!). But in all seriousness, there is an annoying attitude in the fandom of "worthyness". There is a belief amongst many that you aren't "worthy" unless you're popular; a big artist, storywriter, community-leader or whatever. It's a terrible and destructive attitude which isn't only untrue but relies on a ridiculous delusion of fame and popularity. So you might have the most watches on FA, or get adoring fanboys wanting to RP with your fursona 24-7, or have however-many friends on any given furry social networking site following your every move through blogs or whatever; the truth is though, you ain't Elvis. It isn't fame, it isn't popularity. Most of the time, it's just spending too much time on the internet. You only need trawl through the collection of 'big names' out there who in real life seem to be up to their eyeballs in debt, don't have a job, lose their possessions or their property, display staggering insecurity, scrabble around getting commissions to try and make a living, etc. etc... In the words of Mark Knopfler, "What have you got, at the end of the day?"

Sadly, some people accuse me of this too these days. It is quite irritating, given that I didn't get into the fandom for any of that crap. I've had people contact me saying I'm 'famous', but I laugh it off and say it's all bollocks. The fandom is like a weird socially-distorted microcosm, where creative ability and popularity is currency. I've said it many many times that I feel the fandom has all the silly politics of a US high school (at least as represented in popular media) with all its Prom Kings and Queens, and the nerdy unpopular ones who are apparently worthless to humanity. It's all utter nonsense.

At this juncture, I put my hands up and admit that I don't come here as often as I used to when I first found the fandom about 2 years ago; that comes partly from being very busy, partly from things having been a bit quiet around here on occasions (though I think they've picked up noticeably in the past six months), and partly from the fact that being an admin at Eccentricities tends to keep me there most of the time rather than elsewhere. But I do still login here from time to time, and I still post all of my new artwork here (and indeed have contributed to the imagery of the site itself! Heh!) I have developed commitments elsewhere, but this place is like visiting an old friend. I don't forget my roots in the fandom; I still recommend LD5 to others through emails, chats, the link on my homepage etc., I'm sure I bore Dino with thanking him for his generosity every time we have one of our once-in-a-blue-moon MSN chats (seeing as the 9 hour time difference between Alaska and Britain is an utter bastard to get around!) As far as I see it, there's no excuse not to stay in touch. If nothing else, seeing as I've found that LD5 either serves as or hosts the sites by which most people seem to discover at least the paw and macro fetish fandom - if not the wider furry fandom itself - it would be damned ungrateful not to pop on by once in a while.


On that note, I don't think the dome needs to betray what it has always been. Sure, there are flashier sites out there, but the dome doesn't need all that. The dome has . Lol! I think it just needs more people pointed in the right direction and enough of its members simply serving to make it a fun and enjoyable community to be around.

I'm a big subscriber of Sturgeon's Law (and just science-fiction ingeneral). I'm not sure I'd quite say 'worth dying for,' but 'good' might do.

You're just... so... close... to saying something, I feel like, so much of the time, and then when the moment comes you just decide to defer. So, again, "Well if I didn't [defer]... something amazing might happen." That's why it links to the stuff you said/say.

Well, this old dragon came back to his roots after a long, slow, decline into obscurity.

What did it? WORK--or basically, the kind of work I do now. Working overnights recovering and restocking a 10,000 square-foot store, often with no help other than a drowsy teenager minding the checkout. It took all my energy and left me dull and uninterested in anything else.
This past year, I decided to just give up. I took down all my artwork sites, told all my friends the dragon was gone, and stopped participating in real-life furmeets. All I had left was Tapestries MUCK, where like a dying star, I put up 30 characters and cycled through them on a regular basis with the purpose of getting hapless critters turned-on to increasingly exotic creatures like sexy golden crickets and lusty draegloths. It was my last gasp and I finally gave all that up too.

Then I Googled "Byzantyn" just to see what was left online and the artwork I left on LD5 was still there! I thought it would have been taken down long ago when I left, but it was still there (at least up to the point I quit--the artwork I made after that is all gone with the backups--sadly--when I "purged" myself). I missed the old dragon. Stubborn old beast wouldn't die. So here I am again.

Right now it's still just making myself known again and wondering who remembers me. I wanted to go back to my roots and start from scratch (or stomp? *product placement*). My real start was on the Herpetaphile Mailing List (HML) where my first ugly art and stories and whiny melodramatic poetry got posted. That was over 10 years ago--seems like forever.

So does this post, so that's enough for now. Just thought I'd say hi.

Flapflap.

I remember you!
Byzantyn Bloodlightning, if I am not completely mistaken.

Of course it's "still there", Byzantyn. Like I'm gonna wipe claws! Well, I have wiped claws, like...in a claw-cleaning context. But I'm not gonna oblividize them! It's great to hear from you again, welcome back.

They got some kinda new silk-screening kit at Michael's now...would be good for making LD5 T-shirts, but it kinda costs a lot. And doing multiple colors would be tough. But at least we could make T-shirts in super fatass sizes, which let's face it, most of us are.

It's nice to be remembered, and yeah, it is Byzantyn Bloodlightning. Originally it was just Bloodlightning, and he was a demon, not a dragon (an "anti-demon" to be specific, but that's going back to my dragon's pre-history and the chaos that was WebTV). Byzantyn was a kind of alternate name I came up with because (at the time) "Bloodlightning" was too long a nick for Yiffnet IRC (now known as Furnet). Byzantyn was a more friendlier name and he consequently became a friendlier dragon ahem...

Byz is semi-retired still. I haven't even tried making a new picture in almost a year. I wonder if I even can anymore.

Oh well, at least this is a start--or is it re-start?

Hiya Byz! *hug*